Wine Folly: A Little Digression on a Sunday Morning

This morning, my husband got up because the light coming through our skylight woke him up, even before the birds began to sing. He pulled out his iPad and looked at some kind of wine app. We went to our office (aka dining room table) and started doing our wine research. I'm trying to figure our how we can design a gravity flow layout (blog to follow) for our winery and came upon this image (why would it show up on gravity flow?) and it intrigued me enough to go to Wine Folly.

There, I clicked on a video and came upon the same video that my husband was watching in bed! How is that for coincidence. Since we both came upon the same video independently, we thought that it was a sign that we should buy the book. At $14.95 on Amazon, we had to have it!
We have seen the author, Madeline Puckette on SOMM: Into the Bottle and I have come across a few of her illustrations on the Internet that are very well done and very beautiful. The book looks like a very handy, accessible resource to have. I'll blog about it after we receive it.

Pruning Time Approaches

The weather has been getting milder and milder, with a few setbacks such as the cold snap that occurred on the Valentine's Day weekend, so our thoughts are turning to pruning our vines. In looking back at some of our blogposts, Vintage 2015: Pruning Time is Here, we pruned in mid-April, last year, so it seems that we will be pruning a good month and a half earlier than we did last year.
My husband has been looking at how we could facilitate the pruning task and he came upon this video:

It looks like a handy little self propelled people mover that might help us when we have a full vineyard. Right now, we only have about 500 vines so it's entirely doable on foot.

2005 Blain Gagnard Chassagne Montrachet

Isn't it great when your husband (he totally subscribes to "Happy wife, happy life) makes a dinner after you come home from a week of child sitting our grand daughter. He made cod with lemon butter sauce and a side dish of linguini with a fresh salad. And then he pulled out this 2005 Blain Gagnard Chassagne Montrachet to pair with the food. The wine is now more than 10 years old and it took a while to open up, but when it did, I detected notes of licorice and anise along with citrus. The wine exhibited complexity with a subtle touch of oak and a backbone of acidity.

Midwinter Check on our Bud Hardiness

On January 9, we went to our vineyard to cut some canes to send to our nursery. They will be using our budwood to make the tall grafted vines for our Chenin Blanc so they needed to ensure that our vines were "clean", that means free of viruses. Our nursery checked our canes for viruses and pronounced them to be clean so the next step is to send them enough budwood to produce approximately 1000 grafted vines for planting in 2017.
This winter has been on the unusually mild side, but we did have a weekend when temperatures went below zero. It seems that Mother Nature had something special in store for the Valentine's Day weekend. This winter, it was temperatures that were in the negative numbers with windchills bringing the temperature to -30 degrees Fahrenheit.

With all this vacillation in temperatures, we wanted to check our buds to see if they had made it through the coldest temperatures so that when we ship them, they will be healthy. We used an Exacto knife and a camera with a macro lens and we were able to get some photos that showed that our buds were healthy:

Next step, cutting enough canes to provide our nursery with budwood for our grafts! Luckily, we have some warmer weather coming up.

SOMM: Into the Bottle

This movie, SOMM: Into the Bottle was recently released for renting, and on one of those brutally cold mornings when the wind was howling and the news people advised us to stay indoors, we gladly complied and watched this movie about the business that we are about to embark into.
I hope that this is okay, but I've embedded the YouTube video here:

The movie is divided into 10 "chapters". I just love the opening scene when Professor Emeritus Carole Meredith says, "Can there be any other business where there is so much b*llsh*t." It was a good movie to watch on a bitter cold day.

2012 Domaine de la Pépière Clisson Muscadet

We drank this 2012 Muscadet when we had our friends over for a dinner of oysters and salad. Sometimes, the simplest meals are the best to showcase a wine, with the proper pairing. One cannot go wrong with oysters from Matunuck Oyster Bar in South Kingston, Rhode Island. When we went to pick up the oysters, not only was the shucker who gave us the oysters really nice, the customers at the bar were also very nice and friendly. Our usual go to wine with oysters is a sparkling wine/champagne, but we were all very surprised when this Clisson Muscadet from Domaine de la Pépière with its acidity was a good foil for the toothsome oysters.
A very timely article written by Jon Bonne, called France’s Most Underrated White Wine Steps Out, appeared in Punch on February 10, 2016. This article was all about the under appreciated wine from Nantes, located in the western Loire called Muscadet. I have to confess, I always thought (with no proof whatsoever) that Muscadets were cloyingly sweet wines. Then comes this Clisson Muscadet to debunk all of my preconceived notions. Clisson is one of the three fully approved crus communaux comprised of parts of seven different communes whose soil type is classified as coarse with two-mica granite. There are rules that govern how the wine is made, especially when it comes to sur lie aging. Marc Ollivier is the vigneron at Domaine de la Pépière and suffice it to say, he has made me see the light when it comes to Muscadet.

Happy Valentines Day

Vintage Notes 2016

This will be the second year that I am taking vintage notes, which I compiled under the tab labelled Vintage Notes. I began in March 2015 to document what I called Vintage Notes 2015, giving a recap of the winter weather that we were experiencing. For this winter, 2016 vintage notes, we had been having a mild winter with temperatures that dipped into the teens only on January 4th and 5th. We were able to work outdoors during the first week in February, when temperatures soared into the high 40's. Even the ground hog, who did not see his shadow, concurred that the winter will be shorter this year. Ha ha ha, weather persons and ground hogs aside, Mother Nature still rules and on February 5th, it snowed for the entire day. This past week, it snowed off and on and although there was sunshine in the afternoon that kept the accumulation relatively minimal, we are now due for some exceedingly cold temperatures here in the Northeast. They (minus ground hog) are predicting that temperatures with the windchill, will approach -32 degrees F! We went to the vineyard yesterday to start the tractors. Here is a photo of the vineyard with snow accumulations around 5 inches but with drifts of up to a foot in some areas.

Stainless Steel Growler

Our friends have returned home from an 11 week trip to New Zealand and Tasmania by way of Hawaii. We are the recipients of some pretty cool gifts including this stainless steel growler from Mehana Beer Brewery in Hilo, Hawaii.
We discussed how this growler could be used in the winery for repeat customers who would like to get their wine on tap. The stainless steel growler can contain 64 fluid ounces (2 liter) volume and the stainless steel construction can keep cold liquids cold. This is a far departure from using the typical wine bottles, but I found some information on line that might be good for the wine consumer as well as the wine producer:
"Wineries report that their wines on tap can go for 20-30% less than what they would charge for the same wines in bottles. It stands to reason: If they’re selling their wines in pressurized stainless steel kegs, they’re saving oodles of money by not having a bottling line, labels, corks and so forth, not to mention the astronomical power demands of a bottling operation. Beer breweries that forego bottling operations are enjoying similar savings.
Now for the part that everybody likes: Growlers are good for the environment. If you use and reuse (after thoroughly washing) just one container for your favorite beverages, think how many cans and bottles you are avoiding having to discard or recycle."
French winery co-ops have been selling wine on tap forever, so it might be something for us to consider, but for right now, it's a pretty neat gift from our friends and we'll be making use of it to hold our ice-cold water when we work in the vineyard.
References:
1. Living on the Cheap, For cheaper beer and wine, bring a growler. A what?, July 14, 2014, Posted by Susan Hauser.

2011 Littorai Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir

We had our friend over for dinner during the middle of the week. We wanted to begin dinner with oysters, so we drove to Matunuck Oyster Bar in South Kingstown, Rhode Island where they will sell you oysters that you can shuck yourself. We were directed to the oyster bar where Mike, with an obvious passion for his job, explained the three different types of oysters they had on sale that day and gave me a taste of one of the Quonsets. Yumm! Mike also showed my husband how to shuck the oyster, it took him only a few seconds and made shucking look easy. We bought the Quonsets and the Matunucks for dinner. We drank a 2014 Chateau D'Epire Savennières with the oysters and the acidity of the Savennières was the perfect foil for the oysters. This is what we hope to be able to do, pair our Chenin Blanc wines with the local seafood and it appears that oysters will be the perfect match!

For our main course, my husband made pan seared duck breasts with berry sauce, an Internet recipe courtesy of Chef Robert Irvine. A fresh green salad with tarragon vinegar, honey mustard dressing and mushroom wild rice were the accompanying dishes. We paired the meal with this 2011 Littorai Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir.
We toured the Littorai facility in 2012, but we did not buy any wine at that time and always regretted it. Somehow we acquired this singular bottle of Littorai Pinot Noir and enjoyed it with our meal. The only thing that I can recall is that this Pinot Noir was perfect with the duck breast---I was too busy enjoying the company of our friend and the meal that my husband prepared, to critique the wine. May be next time we find ourselves in the possession of another Littorai, I can be more analytical.

Tartaric Acid---Wine Diamonds

Recently, I took a look at one of the red wine corks that we have and saw this shiny, glinting object that I knew was a crystal of tartaric acid. Doing some further online research into tartaric acid took me on a little trip down memory lane. (In a former professional incarnation, I was a small and macromolecular crystallographer, thus my affinity for crystals!)
Grapes, the baobab tree and the tamarind fruit are the only plants that contain tartaric acid.¹ The chemical structure of tartaric acid looks like this:

Tartaric acid is also used in cooking, where it is known as cream of tartar. When it occurs in wine, tartaric acid can exist as the potassium salt (potassium bitartrate), and when it crystallizes out of solution, are known as wine diamonds. In fact, Louis Pasteur was studying wine sediments when he noticed that there were two types of crystals. He tediously separated out the two forms of tartaric acid crystals that he saw under his microscope, and recrystallized the separated piles. He then found that the two forms of crystals rotated plane polarized light in different directions. What Pasteur had done was to separate out the mixture of D- and L-tartaric acid. When the two forms of tartaric acid are found together, they do not rotate plane polarized light and this mixture is called a racemic mixture. I found out that the word racemic comes from the Latin racemus, meaning ‘a bunch of grapes’).³ This elegant(tedious) experiment that Pasteur conducted lead to the discovery of molecular chirality!

Wouldn't you agree that this little cutie looks like a diamond!
References:
1. Patrick McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture.
2. The chemical structure of tartaric acid was drawn by the freely available drawing program from ACD Labs called ACD/ChemSketch Freeware.
3. Crystallography 365, Pasteurized Crystals – Tartaric acid, December 27, 2014.

Tangled Vines by Frances Dinkelspiel

I have to be honest, I would not have bought this book, but it was a Christmas gift and it opened my eyes to the seedy side of wine and more.
The topic of this book is the 2005 fire that occurred at Wines Central in Vallejo, California. The author, Frances Dinkelspiel has a personal connection with the fire because Wines Central was storing two wines that her ancestor, great-great grandfather, Isaias Hellman had made in 1875. It is a thoroughly researched book, with an even handed accounting of the person who set the Wines Central storage facility on fire, Mark Anderson, as well as the background of Rancho Cucamanga where the wine was made and how the two eventually intersected. Throughout the history of Rancho Cucamanga, there were occasions where blood was shed and fortunes were lost and then made. This is the story of early California wine making, the formation of the California Wine Association interleaved with the stories of current highly respected California wineries including Saintsbury, Viader, and Sean Thackery's Orion Rossi Vineyard. It is worthwhile reading through this history to arrive at the end. In spite of the travails that her book relates, Frances Dinkelspiel's recounting of the evening spent with Fred Dame tasting her ancestor's 1875 Port is why wine is so special. It's a good and fast read and filled in a bit of history that I was totally ignorant about.